Subsistence agriculture

About: Subsistence agriculture is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 8069 publications have been published within this topic receiving 156876 citations. The topic is also known as: subsistence farming.

Growth, capital accumulation and economic porosity in Mozambique: social losses, private gains

Abstract: The Mozambican economy has been growing at an annual average of 7.5% for the best part of two decades, and has become one of the three most attractive economies for foreign direct investment (FDI) in sub-Saharan Africa. Yet, it has been ineffective and inefficient at reducing poverty and providing a broader social and economic basis for development. It is argued here that the dominant political economy of Mozambique is focused on three fundamental and interlinked processes, namely the maximisation of inflows of foreign capital – FDI or commercial loans – without political conditionality; the development of linkages between these capital inflows and the domestic process of accumulation and the formation of national capitalist classes; and the reproduction of a labour system in which the workforce is remunerated at below its social cost of subsistence and families have to bear the responsibility for maintaining (especially feeding) the wage-earning workers by complementing their wages or trying to maintain ...

Land use and landscape dynamics in northern thailand: assessing change in three upland watersheds since 1954

Abstract: The forests of Southeast Asia contain biologically diverse communities of vegetation and wildlife. These lands also support millions of tribal people who produce food and fiber for local and regional consumption. Today, traditional uses of forestland are being transformed by national market forces and changing national policies of landownership and land use. While tropical forest loss is recognized as a regional and global problem, little is known about the link between resource use at the local level and its effects on forest fragmentation and loss at the landscape scale. This study analyzed human-induced loss and fragmentation of tropical forests in three upland watersheds in northern Thailand between 1954 and 1992. During this 38-year period, forest cover declined, agricultural cover increased, population and population density grew, and agriculture changed from subsistence to cash crops. These changes resulted in forest fragmentation and loss, with implications for biological and cultural diversity, sustainable resource use, and the economic conditions of the region. By linking the outcome of individual land use decisions and measures of landscape fragmentation and change, we illustrate the hierarchy of temporal and spatial events that, in summation, result in global biome changes.

Class gender and the household: the developmental cycle in Southern Africa.

Abstract: This article evaluates the anthropological concept of "developmental cycle of domestic groups" circa 1949 as applied to the small nation-state around South Africa: Lesotho Botswana and the Bantustans. The areas are complicated by extreme diversity of social structure which survey data based on conceptual paradigms may not grasp to be a dynamic process. Lesotho is still an undeveloped subsistence peasant society. Migrant mine workers usually older men bought land with their wages. Younger men are squeezed out of restricted mine jobs and women obtain irregular low paid work. There is a small urban welfare class. In Botswana there is simultaneously in time and concurrently households migration to jobs in mines industry or urban civil service and investment in farmland. There are class strata in these "worker-peasant" households depending on income. Rapid restructuring of family life is stressful and devastating. Neither male or female-extended nor individual-lead family models should be considered typical since either or both spouses may at one time have migrated to find work. In The Bantustans the situation is bewilderingly complex. There is acute poverty malnutrition overcrowding utter dependence on wage earning in white South Africa or welfare. 3.5 million persons have been forcibly relocated in 20 years. New towns black-owned farms reservations squatter sites and refugee camps alternate with pockets of old established residents. Given the need for 3 generations of consistent data and stable classes any conceptual models will be difficult to test.